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Exploring Girlhood Identity in Technology Camp

Jen England and Robert Cannella

In this article we discuss how the Girlhood Remixed Technology
Camp (GRTC) empowers tween girls to challenge sexist and misogynistic media
portrayals of girlhood by constructing their own digital identities. Drawing from
campers’ projects and blogs, we foreground two important outcomes of the
camp: the development of technological, critical, and rhetorical literacies as girls
pursued their own technology-related goals; and the crafting of powerful, positive
articulations of girlhood through girls’ production of new media and technologies.
We conclude with further considerations for the development of girls’ technology
camps.

Girmay Medhin and Annabel Erulkar

There is increased consensus on the role of adolescent girls in reaching development
goals but few programs for girls have been rigorously evaluated. In Ethiopia,
Biruh Tesfa (Bright Future, in Amharic) mobilizes out-of-school girls into safe
space groups led by mentors. Girls receive training in literacy and life skills, and
they are given vouchers for medical services. A longitudinal study was conducted
to measure changes in girls’ learning outcomes and their use of health services.
After adjusting for background factors, we found that girls who had never attended
school in the project site had significantly higher literacy scores than did control
girls. At endline, girls in the project site were 1.6 times more likely to have used a
health service in the past six months than those in the control site. Girls-only safe
spaces programs can be effective at improving literacy and health-seeking behavior
among the most marginalized girls who otherwise lack educational opportunities
and access to services.

Mohamed Assaf and Kate Clanchy

Five poems written by Mohamed Assaf (a young Syrian boy who currently
lives in Oxford with his family and studies at Oxford Spires Academy) under the mentorship
of the poet Kate Clanchy. The introduction and poems themselves offer a reflection
on Mohamed’s old and new place(s) in the world, and the significance of writing as
a way of responding to, and resisting, “refugeedom.”

Interdisciplinary Perspectives

Laurel Hart, Pamela Lamb and Joshua Cader

Effectively engaging with technologies of nonviolence for girls and young women
requires attention to systemic, symbolic, and everyday forms of violence online
and offline, as well as to how power is broadly manifest. We draw from three different
interdisciplinary perspectives and critical reflections to consider networked
technologies and online communities in relation to nonviolence. We explore mentorship
and subversive education through Neal Stephenson’s 1995 novel, The
Diamond Age: Or, A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer, identity politics on Facebook
in a reflective study of digital citizenship for queer girl visibility, and online grassroots
community solutions in considering the social potential of online forums
and solutions for online harassment. Our varied perspectives encounter contradictions,
such as the need for access to and protection from diverse online communities,
as a necessary consideration for developing policy and creating
networked and community-based technologies of nonviolence. We conclude with
five recommendations in a call to action.